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“In the business I worked in, we hosted weekly events that offered unique prizes They were also designed to allow players to […] complete it with rare in-game currency Dark And Darker Gold, which would enable you to win one of the main prizes. Designers also had to include other milestone prizes on top of the primary prize, which would typically require real money to get ahead in the competition. We have a lot of milestones and metrics to measure the success of an event is of course how much folks spent. We did take into account sentiment, but I think the higher-ups always wanted to know if the event enticed people to spend.”
Real-time transactions don’t have a new look by any stretch of imagination. Diablo Immortal didn’t pioneer them but it’s not honest to state that as fact. Blizzard’s action RPG isn’t the main cause, but instead an unbalanced mix of hundreds of free-to-play mobile as well as PC games. There are two Battle Passes that each have unique rewards exclusive to a character (and not included in your general roster) and a myriad of different currencies that it is difficult for an average player to keep track of Diablo Immortal’s economics read like a huge mobile marketplace.
They are, despite being opposed however, have become commonplace within the entire industry. You could argue that prevalence of loot boxes or other real-money transactions in AAA games have played a role in the development of this precarious economy. However, the more that AAA gaming shifts to the models of games-as services is the more it has in common with mobile games that have been within this extremely popular sphere for almost a decade.
It’s not just evident in the use of money to obtain items however, it is also evident in gacha mechanics, as well as the publication of drop rates of rarer items. Gacha is the practice of using game currency, whether it’s free or purchased via an in-game store, to acquire something random objects cheap Dark And Darker Gold, in the case Dissidia Final Fantasy Opera Omnia, or characters in the ever popular (and persistant) Fate/Grand Order or Genshin Impact.